Posts tagged ROS

Rumors of Willow Garage's death may have been very premature, but they've come true all the same. Businessweek reports that company founder Scott Hassan shut down the robotics research pioneer in January to become the dedicated CEO of Suitable Technologies, Willow Garage's telepresence-focused spi...

Want to try out ROS (Robot Operating System) on an official Willow Garage product, but don't have the $400,000 required to pick up our old pal, PR2? You're precisely the audience the company is looking to hit with the TurtleBot, a (relatively) low-cost robotics kit (around $1,500) that looks a bit...

A while back we got a detailed look at the innards of Qbo, TheCorpora's open-source robot. But we haven't gotten to see the little guy in action -- until now. His handlers recently let him loose to run autonomously, guided by a pair of webcam eyes and voice recognition courtesy of Willow Garage's RO...

It may bear closer resemblance to an upright dog than a human (check out those ears!), but POLYRO here is the least frightening example of a do-it-yourself robot that we've seen to date. We're not sold on the humanoid's name as an acronym (oPen sOurce friendLY RObot), and the instructions and assem...

The Personal Robotics Group at MIT may have already strapped a Kinect to a iRobot Create, but BiliBot did them one better by adding an arm to the mix -- not to mention this cherry-red frame. Better yet, you can order your own BiliBot Developer Edition now for the affordable price of only $1,200. OK...

Remember Cody? The robot from Georgia Tech designed to give spit baths to the elderly and crippled? Well, Cody's got an attractive younger cousin named M-1, and for $340,000 this fine piece of machinery could be all yours. Built by San Francisco-based Meka Robotics, the M-1 Mobile Manipulator (base...

Clearly tired of waiting for Lionhead to put its Milo wizardry to good use, Kinect hacker "roboczar" created an application that turns a plain ol' piece of printer paper into a synthesizer by recognizing shapes drawn on the page as sound buttons. The Kinect sensor scans the object (paper, in this c...

From enhancing your WoW game to putting you in Tom Hanks's shoes, DIYers the world o'er really do seem to love Kinect. And what do we have here? Taylor Veltrop's Veltrobot remote telepresence 'bot uses the PrimeSense open source Kinect drivers for tracking the user's skeleton, with a modified Kondo...

We've been so wrapped up in Kinect hacks lately that we actually missed a Kinect non-hack that emerged last week. PrimeSense, who built the initial Project Natal reference hardware for Microsoft, has released its own open source drivers for the Kinect. PrimeSense is working with Willow Garage (best...

While there have already been a lot of great proof-of-concepts for the Kinect, what we're really excited for are the actual applications that will come from it. On the top of our list? Robots. The Personal Robots Group at MIT has put a battery-powered Kinect sensor on top of the iRobot Create platf...

While it was fun while it lasted, it was obvious that Willow Garage couldn't keep giving away its ultra-high-end development platform PR2 bots forever. After shipping 11 of the bots to research institutes, Willow Garage is now selling the PR2 to all comers -- as long as they've got 400 grand in the...

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While the Willow Garage-initiated ROS is designed to consolidate and accelerate robotics innovation for the long term, it's still a long ways from powering your robotic butler / life coach / best friend, so i...